Just A Matter of Time

Viacom sued Google and YouTube for more than $1 billion. Most media tech watchers predicted the lawsuits would start coming as soon as Google bought YouTube, and even Google set aside more than a billion dollars to prepare for the legal proceedings and settlements. The problem with online video sharing sites is that they are almost designed to infringe upon copyrights. The music industry had Napster, so now the TV broadcasters have YouTube and all the other little guys showing clips of copyrighted material. The theory of media sharing sites is the image of a mix-tape. You record some songs all on one format, perhaps add a personally recorded message, and give it to one person. No big deal, and nobody's making any money off of it, right? But what if that person has a friend that wants to make a copy of that tape? How about there are a few thousand "friends"? How about you need some way of making money to cover the costs of making all those copies? Now, if the media-sharing sites were all non-profit organizations, there might not be a problem here (actually most media-sharing sites actually lose money, but only have paper profits from stock "value"). But if these several thousand people have just experienced the media without buying it or watching the ads that are supposed to accompany the show, the big media guy can say that you and your "friends" cost them revenue. Also, the unauthorized use of copyrighted material need not be limited to profit making endeavors, so that the owners of the material have the right to ask people to stop using them.

This is why I'm so interested in the outcome of all these media sharing companies. Giving a mix-tape to your girlfriend, while technically breaking copyright statutes, is almost never prosecuted. But doing so hundreds of thousands of times sounds like an unauthorized broadcast to me. The action today by Viacom has no effect on the people who actually use media-sharing sites to broadcast their original videos, but if any of them actually use any copyrighted material such as music for a background, without permission, that also is technically wrong. But precedence is also a part of the law, of which we only have about ten years of case law regarding media sharing and copyrights, so I'm interested in how all of this will play out. As someone who remembers the World Wide Web as the Wild, Wild, West, my bias is that everything on the net should be free and if you can make a buck off it, good for you. But even the Wild West turned into the western states, so I'm interested in seeing the how the taming of the web develops.